Clean Energy Super PAC

This week we talk about lobbying, renewables, and the NRA.
We also discuss implied threats, midterm elections, and political action committees.
Recommended Book: Sunward by William Alexander
Transcript
For much of the late 20th century and the first few decades of the 21st, one of the most feared interest groups in US politics was the National Rifle Association, the NRA.
Its power came from a large and politically engaged membership, a mailing list, a grading system that reduced complicated voting records to a letter, and a reputation for ending political careers over specific votes.
Once it attained that reputation, the NRA didn’t have to defeat every politician it disagreed with. Members of Congress only had to believe it could defeat them, and that belief shaped races in which the group spent nothing; politicians went out of their way not to anger the NRA. Money can buy an advertisement or a meeting. What tends to change a vote is the expectation that one choice will be rewarded and another will carry consequences.
The NRA’s influence has declined following internal scandals, financial trouble, and the growth of well-funded gun-control groups. But its model remains potent: pick a few visible fights, and allow your reputation to do a lot of the work for you, in the future.
In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, alongside a related appeals-court ruling later that year, helped create the modern super PAC: a political committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums advocating for or against candidates, so long as it does not coordinate that spending with their campaigns.
This did not eliminate the effort and resources required to build influence, but it meant a few wealthy donors, a competent team, and some carefully selected races could establish a reputation in months rather than decades.
In 2026, solar, wind, and batteries are projected to account for about 93% of new utility-scale electrical generating capacity added in the United States.
That doesn’t mean they provide 93% of the country’s electricity—natural gas remains the largest source in the US—but these technologies are now the overwhelming majority of what the industry is building.
Despite that growth, in 2025 Congress passed a law that sharply rolled back federal support for much of the clean-energy industry, and most of the politicians who voted for those rollbacks appeared to suffer no political consequences for doing so.
What I’d like to talk about today is the effort to build a feared clean-energy lobby, how it has influenced a series of Republican primaries, and what its early successes do and do not tell us about the role of money in American politics.
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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, was signed into law on July 4, 2025.
For wind and solar projects, the new law generally ended production and investment tax credits for facilities placed in service after December 31, 2027, unless construction began within twelve months of the bill’s enactment.
That twelve-month window closed in July of 2026, and a subsequent executive order directed the Treasury Department to adopt a stricter definition of when construction actually begins, further clamping down on entities hoping to benefit from those now-defunct credits.
Tax credits for electric vehicles and residential efficiency upgrades ended in 2025, while support for clean hydrogen was curtailed. Other technologies, including batteries, nuclear power, and geothermal energy, were treated differently, so it would be misleading to say the law eliminated every federal clean-energy incentive, though it did severely curtail a lot of renewables-oriented industries and construction in the US.
Republicans have generally been more supportive of fossil-fuel production and more hostile to federal wind and solar subsidies, while Democrats have generally taken the opposite position. There are important regional exceptions, especially among Republicans whose districts have attracted manufacturing plants, ...